"That's Just The Tip Of The Iceberg."
- 25.08.2026, 17:21
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are expanding their list of targets for long-range strikes.
ISW analysts believe that Ukraine has launched a systematic operation to destroy Russian air defense systems in areas along the Russian border. Air defense systems, radars, and aircraft have already come under attack.
What has the Ukrainian Armed Forces already achieved by destroying Russian air defense systems near the border? What opportunities does this open up for further strikes?
The website Charter97.org posed these questions to Ukrainian military and political analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko of the “Information Resistance” group:
— First and foremost, this makes it easier for the Ukrainian Armed Forces to launch strikes deep into Russia, since there will be fewer defensive positions along the border capable of intercepting Ukrainian drones. Of course, this simplifies the task and increases the effectiveness of such strikes. A greater number of strike drones will be able to overcome this barrier and, consequently, inflict more serious damage on various targets.
In this case, we are systematically targeting Russian air defense systems. And this is not the first time we have done so. This applies not only to the border zone but also to areas along the line of contact, the intermediate and rear zones, as well as the temporarily occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Such a hunt for Russian air defense systems has been underway there for quite some time.
Crimea has even turned into a sort of hunting ground where Russian air defense systems are simply being hunted down.
Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of our strikes deep into the territory of the Russian Federation and scale them up so that more drones and missiles can penetrate, we are destroying Russian air defense systems in significant numbers.
Russia simply cannot keep up with replacing these losses each month. With each passing month, it produces fewer air defense systems than it loses. Therefore, its total number of air defense systems is not increasing but, on the contrary, decreasing.
— After the Wildberries oil refinery and warehouses, the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck Ozon facilities. How will this campaign unfold, and what targets in Russia might be next?
— Overall, this campaign has been quite successful. We are seeing colossal losses being incurred by Russian small and medium-sized businesses. This is impacting the Russian budget, which is funded by taxes and geared toward the war against Ukraine. Therefore, it is very important to us that the Russian Federation’s budget be squeezed to the limit by any means available.
As of today, the Russian side’s losses from such strikes already exceed one trillion rubles. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, Russia faces a severe banking crisis, since all of these small and medium-sized businesses, which relied on loans to survive, have now simply gone under and gone bankrupt.
This will prevent Russia, in the near term, from fully generating any profit in the banking sector from small and medium-sized businesses that operated through marketplaces. For Russia, this is, of course, a disaster.
But the point is that the attacks on Ozon will continue—and they will continue against Wildberries as well. Not all of Wildberries’ warehouses have been destroyed yet. At the same time, as we can see, strikes are being carried out against oil refineries, gas distribution systems, and so on.
Therefore, I think that in the near future we’ll see strikes against a wide variety of supply chain facilities. For example, “Pyaterochka” itself could be targeted, as well as “Petrovich” and a number of others.